<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Excerpts from 'Into the Red Zone: A Guide To the Weird' by Paranormal New Mexico by Nagaina</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28984662">Excerpts from 'Into the Red Zone: A Guide To the Weird' by Paranormal New Mexico</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nagaina/pseuds/Nagaina'>Nagaina</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Ghost Stories On Route 66 'Verse [4]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Overwatch (Video Game)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Documentation, Gen, Horrifying Implications of Horribleness, Travelogue</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 09:20:03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Not Rated</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,487</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28984662</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nagaina/pseuds/Nagaina</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of relevant excerpts from "Into the Red Zone: A Guide To the Weird" by the staff writers, correspondents, and contributors of the webzine/podcast Paranormal New Mexico.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Ghost Stories On Route 66 'Verse [4]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/849924</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>26</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>The Standing Stones of Santa Ana Pueblo</b>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <b>Location:</b>
  <span> Just above the Red Line off I-25 N/Old New Mexico Route 68 N, Sandoval County north of the Albuquerque Military Exclusion Area.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Before the Crisis, Santa Ana Pueblo was a thriving Tamayame reservation, part of the Greater Albuquerque Metropolitan area, and a major tourist draw in the region owing to its world-class golf courses and club, a well-regarded spa resort, a casino and Michelin-starred restaurant, and a multitude of easily accessible cultural sites and events spread throughout the year. All of that changed on the afternoon of August 13, 2046 when Omnic forces advancing on Albuquerque breached the containment cordon along Route 40 and the US military, massed there to stop them, unleashed experimental high energy weaponry designed for that task.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Once the dust settled, the city of Albuquerque and much of the surrounding area, including the Sandia and Santa Ana Pueblos, was almost completely leveled. In the aftermath, the military cordoned off the ruins of the city inside the Albuquerque Military Exclusion Area, which remains under heavily patrolled Federal military control to this day. Evacuees from the surrounding area were strongly encouraged not to return, with offers to purchase their land at pre-Crisis market value to sweeten the deal. Many accepted, a handful did not, and those that chose to do so returned to a pueblo whose buildings were reduced to rubble and scattered with wreckage -- and something weird that was neither.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>The Standing Stones of Santa Ana Pueblo occupy a relatively compact chunk of land on the grounds of what was once Santa Ana Golf Club, shielded from casual view by a stand of cottonwood trees that somehow survived the explosions that leveled the clubhouse and most of the other course structures and did significant damage to the surrounding area. There are nine of them, standing in a geometrically perfect circle, varying in size from from well over six feet to a little over five, perfectly hexagonal in shape, crafted of a dark stone that at least superficially resembles basalt. The inner surface of each stone is densely carved with petroglyphs incised deeply into the rock. The outer surface of each stone is carved with one petroglyph unique to that stone and which cannot be found on any of the others, inside or out. Local experts on Native American petroglyphs continue to research this topic but, as of this writing, none of the petroglyphs that appear on the Standing Stones resemble any glyphs that appear on historical sites in the region. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Nor were the Standing Stones a feature of the area </span>
  <em>
    <span>before</span>
  </em>
  <span> the Omnic Crisis, as confirmed by surviving photos and video of the course and local residents of the area, including the former owners of the golf club. At some point after the evacuation of Santa Ana Pueblo, the Standing Stones appeared in their current location, unnoticed by anyone despite the heavy military presence and regular patrols of the area, and despite the amount of effort such a project would entail. The stones, though tall and relatively slender, are still estimated to weigh several hundred pounds each -- not something that could be loaded, unloaded, and placed by a single person working by hand alone.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>The hundred or so families who make Santa Ana Pueblo their home give the Standing Stones a wide berth, citing weirdly colored lights that appear close to the ground around them and occasionally in the sky above, strange disembodied sounds, and a deep thrumming hum that periodically rises from the area. These phenomena have appeared on official reports from area law enforcement and also on official notices issued from the Albuquerque Exclusion Area’s patrol base. Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, most of these phenomena have been observed around the anniversary of the Battle of Albuquerque on August 13th. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>If you want to try to catch the weirdness in action, make certain you’re prepared to handle high desert summer weather and get your permissions in order accordingly. The former grounds of Santa Ana Golf Course are private property posted against trespass and the area is periodically patrolled by both the US military and tribal coalition police.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>The Last Waffle House In Albuquerque</b>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <b>Location:</b>
  <span> Somewhere inside the Albuquerque Military Exclusion Area.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Everyone has heard the stories: about that one time an unsuspecting A/C repair technician found someone living on a Waffle House roof, a fact totally unnoticed by the staff; that one time an armed robber tried to knock over a Waffle House just after the breakfast rush and ended up being subdued by the customers, many of whom were off-duty police; the drunken sexual escapades in parking lots and bathrooms; the Federal government creating an entire post-disaster community recovery metric based on whether or not the local Waffle House was open. And those are just the verifiably real ones, leaving out the esoterica like exterior security cameras catching blurry glimpses of Bigfoot raiding the dumpsters in Colorado or UFOs buzzing the parking lots in Texas, a creature that locals insist is the Squonk scurrying by to pick up sandwiches left out for it in Pennsylvania and the Jersey Devil loping out of the Pine Barrens to menace late-night diners, the theories that the geometrically perfect nature of the food on offer created the precisely necessary conditions for extradimensional weirdness of all kinds.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>And then there’s the Last Waffle House In Albuquerque. Before the Crisis, Albuquerque was the home of two Waffle House locations -- one at the old Albuquerque International Sunport, the city’s main air travel hub, and another in the city’s eastern exurbs. It was generally assumed that both locations were thoroughly demolished, given that one was below the Red Line and one exactly on it on the day the rest of the city was blown into low Earth orbit.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>This does not appear to have been the case.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Intrepid urban explorers, risking their safety and significant Federal prison time, were among the first people to make their way into the Albuquerque Military Exclusion Area after the end of the Crisis. Some were hired by former residents of the city to retrieve personal possessions that might have survived the destruction. Some were hired to provide independently confirmed evidence that the devastation was as complete as the government claimed. Some were just curious. The results of their investigations can be found in the annals of legal proceedings and on any number of websites. Easily one of the most bizarre: the apparent continued existence of a fully staffed, supplied, and functioning Waffle House, somewhere inside the ruins of the city.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Exactly </span>
  <em>
    <span>where</span>
  </em>
  <span> this Waffle House is located cannot be determined by any of the available sources describing its existence but all of the accounts share certain characteristic elements: those who have found it have all done so just after sundown, after they have become completely lost and unable to find their way back to whichever clandestine entrance they used to access the Exclusion Area. The Waffle House seems to appear out of nowhere, surrounded on all sides by wreckage, some of it still steaming and in several statements verifiably hot to the touch. The interior lights are on and shining, warm and welcoming, and the chain’s distinctive yellow and black exterior signage brilliantly lit and likely visible for some distance. Inside, the restaurant is perfectly clean and undisturbed by the destruction visible outside, warm in the winter and autumn, cool in the summer and spring, music from the franchise’s own record label playing softly in the background.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Accounts differ in specifics beyond that. In some cases, the explorer is the lone customer, waited on by an attentive staff member whose face or name they cannot remember once they’ve departed. In others, the restaurant is packed with locals and travelers, an apparently full and inexhaustible staff buzzing among the tables, though again the explorer can never quite recall the faces or names of anyone they meet. The food is always delicious, perfectly prepared and filling, the drinks never run dry, and even if you’ve cleaned your plate, you’re handed a full carry-out bag along with the check. No explorer has ever remembered how they’ve gone about paying but several have displayed pictures of receipts containing nonsensical strings of non-alphanumeric symbols in place of regular checkout information. Some explorers have asked for information about how to get back to where they entered and recall strangely specific conversations that seem to acknowledge the reality outside the restaurant’s doors and, when followed, lead them exactly where they need to go. Others report being shooed out the door and finding themselves back at their entrance. In all cases, once the door of the Waffle House closes at their backs, the restaurant vanishes completely, as if it never was, the only evidence the leftovers in the chain branded takeout bags and the nonsensical receipts.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>There is some debate among the urban explorers who have penetrated the Albuquerque Military Exclusion Area if the Waffle House can be deliberately sought and found or if it can only be found if one is not actually looking for it. Opinions vary widely. We cannot, for legal reasons, recommend attempting to follow in their footsteps as the Exclusion Area is a potentially hazardous location heavily patrolled by the United States military and, if caught, carries with it severe penalties, including fines and jail time.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Chapter 3</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>Deadlock Gorge</b>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <b>Location:</b>
  <span> McKinley County just above the Red Line north of Gallup and west of Nakaibito, roughly parallel with Old New Mexico Route 491, inside the Navajo Reservation Annex.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>It goes by many names. The Canyon of the Biting Wind. The Hungry Place. The House of Echoes. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Deadlock Gorge.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>The physical reality of the thing: a deep rent in the earth, carved out tens of thousands of years ago by a now-vanished river, the last remnant of which is the slender, spring-fed stream that wends through the bottom of the canyon today. A little over thirty miles long, over fourteen hundred feet deep at its deepest and eight hundred feet at its shallowest, four thousand feet wide rim to rim at its widest point, though it’s narrower at the far northern end, where most of the remains of habitation lie along abandoned stretches of road. A second set of ruins lie in the extreme southern end of the canyon, an Ancestral Puebloan cliff dwelling that is, as of this writing, only just beginning to be properly examined and catalogued by archaeological experts. Its walls are red banded sandstone ridged in escarpments and wind-and-water sculpted stone formations, studded with natural caves and the remnants of mine shafts, both ancient and relatively modern. Officially, no one lives there according to assorted Federal and tribal census reports. Unofficially, no one is entirely sure about that.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Deadlock Gorge has a long, long, </span>
  <em>
    <span>long</span>
  </em>
  <span> history of weirdness, extending from at least the Spanish colonial era and likely well before. No one knows exactly when the cliff dwellings were abandoned, after all, but Spanish records from the early 1700s exist detailing the disappearances of livestock and humans in the vicinity of the Gorge. In one particularly notable instance, a military unit dispatched by the territorial governor to investigate the situation vanished without a trace. The area around the Gorge was only sporadically settled thereafter, most frequently by nomadic indigenous bands passing through the area who never lingered long. This situation persisted until the end of the Mexican-American War, the advent of New Mexico as an American territory, and the surge of westward expansion into the region.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Located smack in the middle of one of the major wagon train and, eventually, railroad routes to California, the Gorge became an obstacle overcome and also a source of opportunity for those that brushed off the “superstitions” of the locals. A town sprang up along the road that wended its way around the northern end of the canyon, one that tended to the particular needs of travelers and prospectors and gave refuge to all comers -- which would eventually lead to both its infamy and its downfall. It was in this town, its name now forgotten and all but effaced from maps of the time, that the infamous Deadlock Gang set up shop and took control, by virtue of throwing anyone who openly opposed them off the edge of the escarpment on which it sat, into the depths of the canyon far below. Daniel “Deadeye” Locke, the leader of the gang, claimed to have sold his soul for his preternatural skill with a gun and rumors swirled of unholy rites conducted on the dark of the moon, blood sacrifices and worse.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>For four bloody years, the Deadlock Gang terrorized both travelers and the neighboring Territories and none dared assault their natural fortress in the Gorge that eventually came to bear their name. It was only a combined force of the US Marshals, the regular Army, and outraged locals that finally brought them to heel and, afterward, the town was abandoned by the shell-shocked survivors, most of whom eventually left the Territory entirely. Prospectors periodically delved into the canyon’s walls nearby and set up temporary camps but never resettled permanently. The ruins of the town lay abandoned and ignored, and the area around Deadlock Gorge remained sparsely populated, well into the 20th Century.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>The advent of the Interstate Highway System changed this -- at least at first. A stretch of History Highway Route 66 wended around the northern end of Deadlock Gorge, running roughly parallel to the old railroad route whose partially collapsed trestle still sits astride the canyon walls. The town -- also called Deadlock Gorge -- sprang up to serve interstate pleasure travelers and brought the ruins of the original town to the attention of historical preservationists, who began agitating to restore or at the very least protect one of the region’s genuine Old West ghost towns from development. Ultimately, only a very small portion of the ghost town was preserved -- the old boarding house, in almost miraculously good shape despite its age and exposure to the elements, the blacksmith/farrier’s forge house, and the house/office belonging to the town’s physician were all added to the state’s Register of Historic Places. Down the newly paved road, one could find diners and gas stations, tacky tourist traps and motels, a genuine biker bar and, persistent rumor suggested, bunkers dug deep into the canyon walls belonging to the US military where top secret weapons research took place during and after World War II.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>As the area became more built up, more generally populated and thicker with travelers, the disappearances began again, as well. On at least four occasions, whole families went missing, their empty vehicles found parked near scenic overlooks, at local campgrounds, in motel parking lots. A more significant number of solo travelers and couples joined the ranks of the permanently missing and no one really knows how many hitchhikers. None of the locals, though, not until the bypass rerouted traffic and the town began to dry up and blow away as so many others had over the years. The exact date of the town’s total abandonment isn’t entirely clear but by the early 1990s, the population of Deadlock Gorge was an absolute zero. Attempts were made to preserve the place for historical reasons but they all mostly petered out until the entire area, including the much older ghost town, was purchased by the Santa Fe Society of Arts and Letters after the Omnic Crisis.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Construction began almost immediately on what would become the Starry Desert Center For Arts and Sciences, a residential artist’s colony that operated successfully for a handful of years before becoming the most spectacular example of Deadlock Gorge’s appetite in modern history. On the night of October 29, 2063, the McKinley County 911 operator responded to repeated calls for assistance from the residents of Starry Desert Center. By the time the authorities arrived, no one was there to be rescued. The entire resident population of the Center -- artists, writers, program directors, the overall site director, and the administrative staff -- were all gone, vanished, leaving behind disturbing signs of some sort of struggle and a lone survivor, a teenage runaway found chained up and critically injured in the basement of the main administrative building. Rumors of cult activity among the staff, echoing the older legends of the demon gunslinger Daniel Locke, swirled among local communities for years afterward, as did the lawsuits levied by the survivors of the vanished, most of which were settled out of court and effectively bankrupted the Santa Fe Society of Arts and Letters, who quietly closed their doors and declined to discuss the matter further.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>For the last decade, Deadlock Gorge has lain unoccupied, weathering under the high desert sun. People avoid traveling the roads around it or across it as best they can, particularly after dark -- but this hasn’t stopped people from vanishing. Every year, a car or two is found, motivator and batteries run down, somewhere along the canyon’s rim. Livestock and pets that wander too close to it aren’t chased into its maw, no matter how valuable or well loved they might be. Teenagers will sometimes camp inside its walls on a dare, though not as often as you might think. Most recently? The University of New Mexico has expressed some interest in acquiring the grounds of the former Starry Desert Center to rehab it into a retreat for their own arts students and staff, and a team from the university’s school of archaeology and anthropology has begun assessing the cliff dwellings in the far south.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>We’ll be keeping a close eye on developments, readers. We hope you’ll do the same. If you want to read more about Deadlock Gorge and its weird history, we suggest you direct your browser to </span>
  <em>
    <span>Massacre In Deadlock Gorge: A Ten Year Retrospective</span>
  </em>
  <span> by our friend and colleague Olivia Colomar.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Chapter 4</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>Hammond’s Homestead</b>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Location:</b>
  <span> Mobile, usually traveling a route from Truth or Consequences to the grounds of the former Holloman AFB to Roswell, occasionally venturing as far north as the former Cannon AFB.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Major Hammond “Ham” Eggar, USAF (ret.), is according to local authorities a crank, a survivalist loon, and a conspiracy theorist, not to be taken in any way seriously by anyone with common sense or at least two brain cells to rub together. To us, the writers, editors, and general contributors to Paranormal New Mexico, he is a friend and a mentor, a supportive shoulder to lean on and one of the few people who believe us when we told him our stories.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He is also one of the handful of USAF rescue pilots who survived the Battle of Albuquerque.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The days leading up to the Battle of Albuquerque where, to put it mildly, chaotic in the extreme. The city’s population was swollen with refugees fleeing ahead of the Omnic advance and the evacuation effort was continuous, fully loaded hypertrains flowing into and out of the old rail hub, planes doing likewise from the skyport, military helicopters shuttling people to rallying points further north. Major Eggar was one of those pilots, ferrying groups of desperate refugees away from Albuquerque, when the hammer, as he puts it, dropped. When he regained consciousness, he was in a military hospital outside Santa Fe. His memories of the chaotic last hours of the evacuation were fragmentary but what he did recall did not match the official story of experimental energy weapons and a clash between the Omnics and the American armed forces. He began asking awkward questions during the course of his recovery -- and when it became clear he would never fully recover physically, he was given an honorable medical discharge and instructions to stop pursuing those questions.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Major Eggar was the only survivor of his crew and the group of refugees he was transporting at the time of his helicopter’s crash. He felt then, and he still feels now, that the truth is owed to those who were lost on that day and to their families. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He continues pursuing those explanations across the Red Zone, traveling in the custom built mobile homestead he designed himself. Every year, the Homestead spends a considerable chunk of time in the vicinity of the former Holloman AFB, one of the US military bases surrendered to the Mescalero Apache Nation after the Sovereign Tribal Territory Repatriation Act of 2050, and winters every year outside Roswell. If you wish to speak with him, and tour the Homestead, it’s best to try to catch him at one of those places. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The Homestead itself is a unique modular design that folds together into a space no larger than an RV and unfolds into a sequence of interconnected geodesic domes equipped with everything an almost perpetually in motion individual would require to survive: water collection, purification, and recycling capabilities; state of the art hard-light surfaces for nearly every possible activity; sanitary, sleeping, and social facilities. The Major is always glad to receive guests interested in his research.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
</body>
</html>